Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launches spacecraft higher than ever

After launch, the reusable New Shepard booster will climb to an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers), the internationally-approved boundary of space, and then proceed to land nearby. After that, both the capsule and the rocket safely returned to Earth.

The launch will also see the New Shepard rocket perform a high-altitude escape motor test to push the ship to its limit.

These latest tests were also created to push the booster to its limit, which led to Blue Origin noting the potential they could lose the booster, not least during the focused testing on the escape system, centered around a solid motor firing for two seconds to fly the capsule free of a failing booster.

"Anything could have happened today, and this is the best possible outcome", said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin's launch commentator.

While this flight was primarily meant to demonstrate the vehicle's escape system, the crew capsule carried eight research and technology demonstration payloads, similar to what the vehicle has done on previous suborbital test flights.

After that, the capsule's experiments enjoyed about five minutes of weightlessness as the spacecraft arced over at the top of its trajectory before plunging back into the discernible atmosphere.

Blue Origin has now tested its powerful escape system at low, mid level and high altitudes, building confidence the spacecraft and its eventual passengers can, in fact, survive a catastrophic in-fight booster failure. At the time of publishing, Blue Origin Origin did not reply to questions about how many more tests flights are needed before testing with humans begins.

But Blue Origin officials have not announced pricing or when tickets might go on sale. It's coming, but we've got our eye on the prize, and we've got to make sure we understand our system through and through. "At Blue Origin, we're all about safety", she said. Meanwhile, today's mission 9 included, for the first time ever, employee cargo from the firm's "Fly My Stuff" program.

With the production facility at Exploration Park all-but ready to start producing New Glenn hardware, work is also now taking place on the LC-11 and LC-36 pad facilities from which the rocket will be tested and launched from.

This year has already been packed with rocket launches, and many of those have come from SpaceX.

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